Infants' detection of analogs of 'motherese' in noise

Abstract

Adult-to-infant (Al) speech has been found to be especially salient to young infants, but the mechanism underlying this salience is not well understood. The present study is a test of the possibility that stimuli with the properties of Al speech are more detectable in a noisy ambient environment. To test this hypothesis, 4-month-olds were habituated to white noise; following habituation, one of three different signal stimuli were added to the white noise. One signal stimulus was a monotonic pure tone, another was a frequency-modulated sweep corresponding to the intonation parameters of adult-to-adult (AA) speech, and the third was a frequency modulated sweep corresponding to the intonation parameters of Al speech. Infants showed evidence of detecting only the signal modeled after Al speech